For more information, please call the David Brower Center at 510.809.0900

Event

The Lake Project: Artist Talk with David Maisel

David Maisel will present "The Lake Project" and samples of his other work focusing on environmentally impacted sites. Maisel will discuss the elements of advocacy within his art and present images spanning the past two decades of his photographic work. The presentation will be followed by an informal Q&A session with the audience.

In 2001, David Maisel photographed at Owens Lake, once a 200 square-mile lake on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada in California. The resulting Lake Project offers stunning aerial images of a fertile valley transformed into an arid stretch of land.

Beginning in 1939, the Owens River was diverted to bring water to Los Angeles. By 1926, the depleted lake exposed vast mineral flats, and the lakebed soon became the highest source of particulate matter pollution in the U.S., emitting some 300,000 tons of carcinogens annually. Blooms of bacterial organisms emerged from the very little water that remained, turning it a deep red. Viewed from the air, vestiges of the lake appear as a river of blood, a bisected vein, or a galaxy map.